But I like Gentoo for the reason it's more simple. Has more packages in the official ports.
I don't like AUR is maintained by Arch Linux users and some packages are unstable.
Some packages are necessary or useful, are in AUR. Arch need more developers?
The downgrades are difficult to make (you need the binary of the previous version.).
Pro for Arch Linux, the installation is obviously faster, pacman is simple to use, they have good documentation on the wiki.

Not sure I like how arch handles package groups (if I'm understanding it correctly), say if the devs add a package to the base group, I would not get that package automatically as the group is already installed (right?). If the gentoo devs add a package to the base (profile?) I'd get that on my next emerge -uDNav world (right? Excuse me if I've got everything wrong)

I use ArchLinux because it give what Slackware, if I am up to date, miss to have: a complete package manager. Between others, Slackware and Gentoo give's to the user the possibility and the need to personalize and control the system, so ArchLinux who his, as it's say, based on Gentoo and Slackware, have this charateristic too.

Gentoo is a sources distribution and is more complete then ArchLinux in that way. However, you do not need USE flags to personalize what you compile. You can do it with the configure options in general and more specificaly in the PKGBUILD with ArchLinux. For a complete compiled system, it would be painfull.

There is one thing it's say in the ArchLinux world, that compile sources for machine specific architecture and material do not give more performance and stability then generics binary's. I doubt. _________________Paul

I use ArchLinux because it give what Slackware, if I am up to date, miss to have: a complete package manager. Between others, Slackware and Gentoo give's to the user the possibility and the need to personalize and control the system, so ArchLinux who his, as it's say, based on Gentoo and Slackware, have this charateristic too.

Gentoo is a sources distribution and is more complete then ArchLinux in that way. However, you do not need USE flags to personalize what you compile. You can do it with the configure options in general and more specificaly in the PKGBUILD with ArchLinux. For a complete compiled system, it would be painfull.

There is one thing it's say in the ArchLinux world, that compile sources for machine specific architecture and material do not give more performance and stability then generics binary's. I doubt.

While you will not get more stability from customized binaries than you would get from generic binaries, you will get more performance from customized binaries. The fact that they are customized for a specific architecture allows them to use only one codepath, which is optimal for your system. That makes the binaries smaller, reducing load times and the memory footprint. While that is not a huge effect, it is measurable.``

moved my main box from Gentoo=> arch, running a nice chunk of Gentoo guests in KVM

I do miss Gentoo already, and would prefer it on the desktop, but it simply makes the process of crafting an initramfs for crypt-root way, way, way too cumbersome.
What worked for me in '04-'05 no longer works. I tried 40 or 50 different permutations of an initramfs, different methods (genkernel, mkinitrd, crafting by hand) and finally said screw it.

Arch automates this, very very nicely.

Need full volume crypto, so this was a killer for me. At some point I'll back up my VM's, and move this back to Gentoo after "reverse engineering" the initramfs that Arch creates, but thus far Arch has been pretty damn stable for me, and the doc pretty top quality (I think the loss of the Wiki a year or two back was it? Was a major setback)

That's it. That's literally the only reason I tried out Arch. I'm going nuts from not having the same level of control, but alas at this stage it's a critical requirement I have that Gentoo is not meeting.

If I had a decent - and most importantly, RELIABLE - tool for an initramfs, where I could just change a few configuration settings somewhere, fire it off, and have one that's pretty well guaranteed to get me to luksOpen without issue, I would be back tomorrow.

I prefer Gentoo in every single other capacity, top to bottom, except that one niggling thing. And fuck, this community is amazing. I had another account back in '04, but well, the nick was totally gay; I've been 'round for a bit, and it's been top notch folks here day in day out.

Ah well, like I said, one of these days I'm going to rip apart Arch's initramfs, see where I went wrong, fix it, and go back to Gentoo.

It's about time to build out a new box anyway, so that may be the test bed. I just needed to have something up and running quickly, so I could put up my VM's for web/irc/mail. Spending a full week working on the crypto was not an option.

I was a Gentoo user for a while, went distro hopping, landed on Arch for a year or so, got bored, and installed Gentoo again. So far I haven't gone back, but I intend to eventually -- maybe this summer.

Arch IMO really shines in terms of maintenance. There's less to do to keep an up to date, stable system. In a year of using it I only had one problem (not including the ones I caused myself) just running 'pacman -Syu' regularly (that was a libjpeg upgrade that broke backwards compatibility somehow -- it was simple enough to wait for the rest of the software to pick it up). Gentoo is still waiting for me to resolve 6 configuration file conflicts (I'll get around to it eventually) and, naturally, takes forever to update or install new software.

The Arch system is set up a little more ... sparsely, I guess, than Gentoo. BSD init scripts, for instance. It's easier to keep track of, in my mind at least. But Gentoo runs faster for me and offers a bit more control. Also I forgot the convenience of compiling one's own kernel. And the Arch repos lack some software that I like to use on Gentoo.

You know you can use Arch kernel for Gentoo. I did the opposite... and I do it all the time (mixing up kernels of all distros)_________________Buy from companies supporting opensource -- IBM, Dell, HP, Hitachi, Google etc...
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You know you can use Arch kernel for Gentoo. I did the opposite... and I do it all the time (mixing up kernels of all distros)

aye, I'd thought about that.

But when I move back I don't want to keep Arch around to keep generating the initrd for me.
I want to know what they did right with it that I did wrong; once I've learned this, I'll go back to Gentoo as soon as I'm fully confident I know what was missed.

But when I move back I don't want to keep Arch around to keep generating the initrd for me.

It seems it would be really cool to port the Arch's initrd tool to Gentoo. Let me know if I can help somehow.

I agree. Hell, soon as this madhouse at work calms down a bit I'm going to look at it very seriously. I'll admit I've done zero looking into how they do it thus far.

(good news there actually: showed my barely-technical boss the advantages of gentoo, he saw a sluggish CentOS vs Gentoo screaming, he's now a believer/convert, and we're now putting our entire SaaS atop Gentoo Xen guests - 8 proxies in the US, 10 in Peru, 2 MX in the US, 2 in Peru - and I've had the pleasure of writing ebuilds for our RPM's! But between being the only one looking after those servers, only one maintaining the ebuilds, the only one at the company that knows and/or doesn't fear Gentoo, as well doing QA for our product, writing spam sigs/keyword nonsense, and loads of other stuff, I'm working 14-18 hour days, so no tinkering time. Either way, I'm proud of Gentoo! And I'm sure there will be more to come. My boss who wouldn't know the difference in the underpinnings described it as "shit hot")_________________Lost configuring your system?
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Speaking of CentOS... I don't expect it to work for desktops... its Kernel should be tweaked for servers; that will be horribly unresponsive for the desktops.

I am aware. These were servers. It is still a bloated to hell pile of dog shit. A bare minimal base CentOS install you're still looking at ~200MB memory used on startup. My Gentoo VM's were using 20-25MB each upon startup - partially a very lean kernel, partially snipping out idiotic shit from startup that should never be on a server to begin with, and I'd assume partially not having to mmap() half the feckin drive just to load one binary! (and to be clear, this was not inclusive of our proxy's memory footprint.)

So basically how this happened, I was stuck down in Peru, and we'd deployed 5 proxies on CentOS already, as ESXi guests. Long story short, fucking random connection resets, partial page content, etc etc. Really annoying shit, the trip was nearly a catastrophe - I was down there to deploy our product for a big OEM deal, and shit, some bug of ours (or so I thought) is causing random resets and partial page content...

So as a troubleshooting tool only, I build out a Gentoo VM, largely because I'm a hell of a lot more familiar with it, and it's heaps easier to get the requisite tools on there. I was trying to replicate the issue, but well, I couldn't; our software was working wonderfully.

From there my boss said "fuck it, I don't care what it runs on, as long as it works, and that gentoo test box of yours is flyin' - faster than our production systems in the US".

When we got back to the US, we were looking at deploying more servers of our own, he says "no no no, make it Gentoo, it's shit hot, and this is your baby to maintain"

I realize not all of this is 100% sound on the technical side, and I realize Gentoo hasn't reinvented the wheel, but "merely" pieced together a bunch of existing projects, but I'm pleased. I mean hell, perceived quickness *does* make a difference. BFS is a classic example of this; I have yet to see any benchmarks showing it yields an improvement, yet, everyone who makes the switch immediately notices a snappier UI.

Speaking of CentOS... I don't expect it to work for desktops... its Kernel should be tweaked for servers; that will be horribly unresponsive for the desktops.

I am aware. These were servers. It is still a bloated to hell pile of dog shit. A bare minimal base CentOS install you're still looking at ~200MB memory used on startup. My Gentoo VM's were using 20-25MB each upon startup - partially a very lean kernel, partially snipping out idiotic shit from startup that should never be on a server to begin with, and I'd assume partially not having to mmap() half the feckin drive just to load one binary! (and to be clear, this was not inclusive of our proxy's memory footprint.)

So basically how this happened, I was stuck down in Peru, and we'd deployed 5 proxies on CentOS already, as ESXi guests. Long story short, fucking random connection resets, partial page content, etc etc. Really annoying shit, the trip was nearly a catastrophe - I was down there to deploy our product for a big OEM deal, and shit, some bug of ours (or so I thought) is causing random resets and partial page content...

So as a troubleshooting tool only, I build out a Gentoo VM, largely because I'm a hell of a lot more familiar with it, and it's heaps easier to get the requisite tools on there. I was trying to replicate the issue, but well, I couldn't; our software was working wonderfully.

From there my boss said "fuck it, I don't care what it runs on, as long as it works, and that gentoo test box of yours is flyin' - faster than our production systems in the US".

When we got back to the US, we were looking at deploying more servers of our own, he says "no no no, make it Gentoo, it's shit hot, and this is your baby to maintain"

I realize not all of this is 100% sound on the technical side, and I realize Gentoo hasn't reinvented the wheel, but "merely" pieced together a bunch of existing projects, but I'm pleased. I mean hell, perceived quickness *does* make a difference. BFS is a classic example of this; I have yet to see any benchmarks showing it yields an improvement, yet, everyone who makes the switch immediately notices a snappier UI.

Anyway, I've had a lot of coffee, time to stop typing.

Nice story. It is nice to hear that businesses do switch from CentOS to Gentoo Linux. I think that Gentoo Linux is worth the time it takes to compile stuff and it would be nice if more businesses saw that.

Nice story. It is nice to hear that businesses do switch from CentOS to Gentoo Linux. I think that Gentoo Linux is worth the time it takes to compile stuff and it would be nice if more businesses saw that.

Nice story. It is nice to hear that businesses do switch from CentOS to Gentoo Linux. I think that Gentoo Linux is worth the time it takes to compile stuff and it would be nice if more businesses saw that.

Now if only we can do away with this

Code:

oursoftwarename.redhat_i586.rpm

really not suitable for a load quad core opterons.

If you are running Gentoo Linux, what keeps you from compiling the software to run natively in 64-bit mode on the processors used?